“A Breath of Fresh Air with a KDE Soul”* – OpenMandriva­ Lx 2014 is burning free!

All of us in the OpenMandriva Community are pleased to announce the release of OpenMandriva­ Lx 2014.0 Phosphorus!

This release is the culmination of a huge effort by our community to bring a fresh, new release of good quality to our supporters and – to the world!:)

The name of our release, taken from the Greek meaning “Light-Bringer”, describes our hopes for this work. What you will have on your disks in a few hours will, we hope, will showcase some of what our predecessors might have done if they had continued their work. We wanted to rekindle the spirit and hope that made their efforts so exciting and in doing so pass that same feeling on to you.

Those of you who have used the original Mandrake/Mandriva distributions for many years will find some familiar ground, and there is also much that is new and updated and some that has been retired. Before giving details of what you’ll find on the iso a few “Credits” are in order.

Grateful thanks go to our whole Cooker team whose dedication has resulted in this work. The team led by Bero, our release manager, has produced a fast, sleek innovative OS to be proud of. We thank our project manager TPG for his boundless energy and drive, Crisb who has effectively killed off the cockroach population and Symbianflo, serial packager, who is getting to grips with the contrib repository, our kernel master, Nicolo Costanza and our supporters BFQ team (Paolo Valente e Arianna Avanzini), our KDE guru Pulfer. Huge thanks also go the artwork team led by Rugyada who have brought us such a fresh and airy theme. We thank the Workshop team and particularly Panahbiru and Linukiss for the brand new OMA-­Welcome application which now greets old hands and first time users alike, to Davide Garatti for his documentation.

It would take huge space here to list all of our great developers and supporters, and the list of those who have helped in some way is even longer – we can not mention everyone here – just visit our IRC (#openmandriva-cooker@freenode) and meet our fantastic team!

From these sources has all the creative work come but their efforts would not have made it to the final product without the help of the QA and Infra Teams and of Avokhmin who always seems to be there just when he is needed.

We offer our grateful thanks to our sponsors, the companies “Rosa” and “Conectiva”, who have made possible our presence at various events that has vastly increased the visibility of our efforts, their input gave us the opportunity to bring our OS to the wider world, and to OpenMandriva Association, which provided the environment that has allowed this work to be created.

And last but by no means least, we warmly thank all of our contributors and bughunters, who help us to promote OpenMandriva Lx, give help to users through our forums (http://openmandriva.org/forums), Community Pods (http://openmandriva.org/pods), who report bugs and help making the user experience for everybody even smoother and more enjoyable.

The kernel has been upgraded to 3.13.11 nrjQL – a powerful variant of the 3.13.11 kernel that has been configured with desktop system performance and responsiveness in mind. To achieve this the CPU and RCU have been configured with full pre­emption and boost mode, and the CK1 and BFQ patchsets have been added to provide further optimisations (including better CPU load and disk I/O schedulers, an improved memory manager using UKSM, and TuxOnIce providing suspension and hibernation services.

SQUASHFS_MULTI_DECOMPRESSOR within the kernel supports the use of all available CPU’s for faster booting of Live Images.

Grateful thanks go to Paolo Valente and Arianna Avanzini for their efforts on the BFQ scheduler. We are the first to have this version.

This is first kernel version we enabled three new kernel keys to test the “EDID ovverride” feature,with this we should be able to override an incorrect screen EDID with boot time options, we have included EDIDBINS in the ISOs, a package containing 5 basic firmwares for the most common resolutions so that users may force different resolutions than the ones detected automatically by X.

The CONFIG_ACPI_CUSTOM_DSDT key allows loading of a customised acpi table. Details will be found on our Wiki in the kernel pages.

A new OMA- Welcome application which allows quick and easy set up of a your newly installed system.

LibreOffice-4.2.3 The latest LibreOffice feeaturing much faster load times and many bug fixes.

Xorg:

Updated x11­server to 1.15.1 version and Mesa to 10.1.0. bringing updated free drivers for best performance. A compose cache that greatly speeds up application startup time and reduces memory usage especially in locales with large Compose tables (e.g. all UTF­8 locales).

Networking:

Firewalld support has been enabled as the next ­step in managing iptables.

Support for realmd for easy and out-­of-­box user authentication in a network environment.

Artwork:

New themes for the desktop, Grub2, Plymouth, KSplash and the KDE environment. A new screensaver and user avatars. The panel is dynamically sized to suit screen resolution.

Java:

The java stack has been fully rebuilt, and the work backported to 2014.0.

Spotlight is a fully functional eclipse 4.3.1.

KDE 4.12.4

With a new menu launcher – Homerun. The default is a full screen version, but a more classical menu may be selected if desired.

13 comments

anonymous

ferri

I tried to start live OpenMandriva Lx 2014 64 bit on my notebook HP ProBook 4740s with Radeon graphics. But the booting broke with black screen and the only white cursor on it. Keyboard was without any response. So I had to switch off notebook.